New Delhi: The legal battle over Sunjay Kapur’s Rs 3,000-crore estate took an interesting turn on Monday when Karisma Kapoor’s children Samaira and Kiaan Kapur told Delhi High Court that their late father Sunjay’s will is “forged and buried in deep suspicion.”
Senior Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, who is representing 20-year-old Samaira and 15-year-old Kiaan — the late businessman’s children from his earlier marriage to actress Karisma — made the submission while challenging the validity of a will allegedly made in favour of Kapur’s third wife, Priya Sachdev Kapur.
“Circumstantial evidence shows clearly that the contents of the will are forged and is buried in deep suspicion,” Jethmalani told the single-judge bench of Justice Jyoti Singh.
Jethmalani argued that Sunjay’s will had been deliberately forged to “disinherit” the two children from his first marriage.
Jethmalani had raised doubts at the last hearing about the origin and storage of the digital file that is said to contain the will. He had pointed out that the Microsoft Word document, first created on February 10 and last modified on March 7, was stored on the device of Nitin Sharma, a man reportedly close to Priya Kapur and one of the two listed witnesses.
Jethmalani, continuing his arguments in the high-stakes case on Monday, said that it “defies logic that while on holiday in Goa with his son, Sunjay Kapur would be modifying a will stored on someone else’s device.”
Saying that no affidavits have been submitted by any of the two witnesses, the senior advocate told the court that metadata from the file on Sharma’s device suggests it originated from a different computer.
“Whether this is the first file, I don’t know. Whether it came from another interested person, I also don’t know. But it is only a file — whether it is the actual will, we do not know. There is acute secrecy among them as well,” Jethmalani said.
He further questioned authenticity of the document, pointing out that it misspelled his client’s brother’s name and listed the daughter’s address incorrectly.
These “bloopers”, Jethmalani said, were “very uncharacteristic of Sunjay Kapur.”
The advocate said that Kapur was in great health and his Indian property was secured by a tight trust.
“The circumstantial evidence is so completely contrary it leads to assumptions… that the contents of the will are bad. I say this based on his phone conversations with his ‘disinherited’ children,” Jethmalani said.
He added that Sunjay shared a close relationship with his children, hence making such errors and omissions are highly unlikely.
Kapur, 53, died in June of a heart attack in the middle of a polo match in the UK.
